Video: Fixing strokes and isolating edits

In this exercise, we are going to take care of a problem that exists here inside of the tongue and mouth region. Basically we have an alignment issue going on. I'm working still inside the Calendar face.ai file that I opened at the beginning of the previous exercise and I'm going to go ahead and zoom in. We can't really see the problem when we were zoomed out but it starts appearing at around 1600%, then we see it very nicely at 2400%. Which may make you ask, is that really that important? I mean this little bit of alignment problem, you can see. As the tongue goes too high and goes into the lips, is that really going to show up in print? And the answer is very possibly not necessarily, but this is the kind of problem I have run into on a regular basis. I have encountered these a lot over the years and if you want them, if they are on purpose then great. If they are not on purpose, I think they look just absolutely rotten, I think they look amateurish and so I like to eliminate them if possible.

Adobe Illustrator has long been a popular vector–based drawing program, but for many the learning curve is steep. In Illustrator CS4 One-on-One: Fundamentals, author and leading industry expert Deke McClelland shows users how to get in to the Illustrator mindset and overcome this learning curve. He covers the application's key features in a new way, making it simple and easy to master Illustrator. Deke teaches viewers how to use the core drawing and shape tools, the transformation and reshaping features, text, and the Pen tool. He also explains how to export and print. Even if learning Illustrator has been a struggle in the past, this training can help make sense of it. Exercise files accompany the course.

Fixing strokes and isolating edits

In this exercise, we are going to take care of a problem that exists hereinside of the tongue and mouth region. Basically we have an alignment issuegoing on. I'm working still inside the Calendar face.ai file that I opened atthe beginning of the previous exercise and I'm going to go ahead and zoom in.We can't really see the problem when we were zoomed out but it starts appearingat around 1600%, then we see it very nicely at 2400%. Which may make you ask,is that really that important?I mean this little bit of alignment problem, you can see. As the tongue goestoo high and goes into the lips, is that really going to show up in print? Andthe answer is very possibly not necessarily, but this is the kind of problem Ihave run into on a regular basis. I have encountered these a lot over the yearsand if you want them, if they are on purpose then great. If they are not onpurpose, I think they look just absolutely rotten, I think they look amateurishand so I like to eliminate them if possible.

So basically, my take on it is let's address the problems as we see them. Sohere we are zoomed in on the tongue, what can we do about it? Well start nowwith the Black Arrow tool selected, because if you click on the tongue with theBlack Arrow tool active, you will select this entire group including thislittle necklace below the tongue and so on. Say, what we want is the WhiteArrow tool here which you can get by pressing the A key. I'll click off thenI'll Alt-click or Option-click on the tongue outline in order to select it.Now you can plainly see how this one- point stroke is writing half on theoutside of the path and half on the inside of the path. You can change thatfrom the Stroke palette with this Align Stroke option right there. So noticethat you can move the stroke all the way out, if you want to or all the way inif you prefer. Now it might seem like in is the way to go for this guy. We areno longer having a problem with it going too high on the lips, but I reallywant it to be right there on the edge of the lips. So this is no good. I don'tlike this effect at all.

So what do we do about it? Well, let's leave it as it was, Align Stroke toCenter, which also makes the tongue aligned better with the necklace elements,you might notice down here, and let's take a different approach to thisproblem. I'm going to click off of the path in order to de-select it and thenI'm going to click just on this line segment between the two anchor points. Sojust click on that line segment to select it independently of the rest of thetongue and then press the Backspace key or the Delete key on the Mac in orderto delete that segment.

Now, notice that Illustrator goes ahead and keeps the tongue filled with white,but it also, at the same time, gets rid of that offending segment. Now we havea problem, of course, with this white showing up in front of the lips, we willtake care of that in a moment. But we have a larger problem, which is that theround joint goes up and over the point and so we can see just a sliver of itover the top of this lip intersection here.Don't want that, don't really need this cap at all in fact because both of theend points that are affected, are affected badly by it. So why don't we go overto the Stroke palette and click on the Butt Cap and that will shave that guyoff right there. But we have this lip intersection line that is being cut bythis white inside of the tongue but we need to fill for the tongue in order tocover up other objects. So we will just go ahead and switch back to the BlackArrow tool, click on this horizontal line and then press Ctrl+Right bracket orCommand+Right bracket on the Mac to move it forward.

Still got a problem actually and that's that this little line right here isriding high as you can see. The cleft in the tongue is going up into that toplip right there in a way that I don't want it to. And what I could do, ofcourse, is just grab these tongue elements and move them down. So for example,I could with the White Arrow tool Alt +drag or Option+drag like so at thislocation in order to select both of these tongue paths.The reason I had to marquee the paths is because they intersect each otherbecause we have two paths on top of each other and the reason I press the Altkey or the Option key is to go ahead and select all of these two paths. Andthen I could move them both down by pressing the Down-arrow key like so andthat would move the entire paths down, but let's say I didn't want to do thatfor whatever reason. The bottom of the cleft of the tongue was exactly where Iwanted it to be. I just wanted to move that top point.

All right, I'll go ahead and move it back in a position here. So what you woulddo in that case, we have got two points that are on top each other. So youcan't just click on one and Shift-click on another. They are coincident points.So we need to marquee around them, but if I do a little marquee like thiswithout pressing the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac, notice I select abunch of different paths. So I'm selecting the lips. I'm awfully zoomed in herebut I think I'm selecting those rotated rectangles, remember those that areright behind the circle that makes up the face. Everything is coming at thisintersection. It's like all this traffic right here at this one point, so itjust can't get to that point. So what do I do?Well, it's a really great think inside of Illustrator. It's called theIsolation Mode. So you can enter a group isolated from the rest of theillustration. I'm going to go ahead and click on the Black Arrow tool to makeit active and then I'll click on the tongue in order to select that entiregroup. I'll go ahead and zoom out here and recall that it is part of thislarger group. If I double click on any portion, anything that is selected here,I'll enter this Isolation Mode. So notice that I have gone inside of this groupand everything that's outside of the group has dimmed on me. I can no longerselect those items. So if I click or drag out there, they are dead to me.

And this is a good Isolation Mode, by the way; this is the Isolation Mode thatyou want to be in, in order to modify this tongue. So go ahead and now get yourWhite Arrow tool, marquee around the top of the tongue like so. Now you don'thave a problem with grabbing everybody else and then I'll go ahead and pressthe Down-arrow key a couple of times in a row to make sure that we are bringingthis stroke down far enough in order to avoid the top of this line.Now, you might have said, hey Deke, why didn't you just cleave off the top likeyou did with these guys? Why didn't you just get rid of that cap? Because if Ihad selected the Butt Cap then I'd ruin these end points too at the bottom ofthe cleft. That's why that was not an option. So I'll undo that modification.

We have to leave it nice and rounded.Now, let's check if we have done a good job. You can just press the Escape keyin order to escape that Isolation Mode that's one way to work, or if you don'twant to press the key, if that's not really your way of working, I'll just goahead and double click again in order to enter it and notice, we are inside ofthis group, you can click on the next item over to go out to the paths. Now youare isolated to all the paths or you could click on this green arrow here, thisleft pointing arrow in order to exit the Isolation Mode and return to thelarger illustration where everything is now available for modification.

All right, so pretty cool, that Isolation Mode. It works wonders actually inIllustrator. You can take advantage of it right, left, and center. In the nextexercise, we are going to take care of this problem where we don't have richblacks you may have noticed that; our new objects are not set to rich blacks,we need to take care of that. But the new thing that I'm going to show you ishow to create a pattern fill, very exciting. Stay tuned!

Q: Adobe Bridge CS4 is not previewing files in the same way for me as it is in the tutorial. All I am seeing is a low-quality thumbnail of the image, not previews of each artboard. Why is there a difference between the tutorial and what I am seeing?

A: There is a different view in the tutorial because the author used a beta version of Bridge during the recording. The final release of Bridge CS4 displays thumbnails as you describe.

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